KARL FROM Sling Blade WAS PARTIALLY INSPIRED BY ALPINE CHARACTERS. As I said, there were a lot of characters there.
Then there was my grandma’s friend, this old lady who would write little articles for the paper in Arkadelphia. Arkadelphia is the town closest to Alpine, and when I was a kid it was home to about ten thousand people. We would go into town one Saturday a month to get supplies or whatever, and ultimately I would go to college there at Henderson State University, where my parents had both gone. Anyway, one time there was a dispute over some property issue where some guy was mad at another guy because the guy put his fence row too close to his place, or something. So the guy who was mad about the fence decided to take matters into his own hands. The guy with the fence raised chickens and turkeys and had some prize turkey he was fattening up for something, so the first guy sodomized the other guy’s turkey and killed it. I don’t know if he choked it while he did that, I don’t know if he killed it just by screwing it, I don’t know, but one way or the other, the first guy fucked the other guy’s turkey to death, and they went to court over it.
This friend of my grandmother’s came running up to my grandmother’s house, saying, “Maude, you never gonna believe this! They’ve saved that old turkey’s butt for a witness!” Now what it really was, to my understanding, is that they froze it or put it up in bags so they could examine the anus to get the guy’s stuff, or whatever, as evidence. But she said witness. So my mother always said she had this image in her head of this turkey’s ass on a witness stand testifying.
MY COUSIN MARK WAS THIS BRILLIANT HYPERACTIVE KID WHO MOSTLY hung out with my brother Jimmy. Mark was inventive and real crafty. His head ran faster than most people’s, but he just couldn’t control himself and always found himself in some kind of mess.
He ended up having a motorcycle wreck and lost a leg. One time, Mark came into my aunt and uncle’s, and he didn’t have his leg. He had gone down and pawned his artificial leg to a pawn shop. My mom said, “I understand Mark pawning his leg because he does stuff like that. What I don’t understand is what the pawn shop owner wants with an artificial leg.”
Mark is the guy who introduced me to this sort of semi-retarded guy or whatever he was, who lived in town up in Arkadelphia. Every town’s got a guy who’s what they used to call shell-shocked. Now there’s some other term for it. Post-traumatic stress disorder. Used to be shell-shocked. Anyway, this guy could have been one of those, but there was something wrong with him, maybe it was like autism. We didn’t know about autism or anything like that in those days. Regardless, we used to pick on him some, because kids do shit like that—you know, pick on the retarded guy. He wasn’t a kid, he was an older guy. Now, when I say older guy, when I was a kid, somebody forty was an old man to me. My dad died when he was forty-four or forty-six, I can’t remember which, and I thought he was an old man. In any case, kids can be pretty cruel.
Anyway, this guy would just kind of mumble and shuffle around town, and he had a root that he could hang out the side of his overalls, where they dip down by your hip. He could pee outside his overalls. He used to chase us sometimes because we fucked with him, but if any of us had any loose change we would pay him to pee outside of his overalls because this son-of-a-bitch, he had a fucking joint on him, it didn’t even look human. It literally looked like it came from an animal—like a mule dick or something. I don’t remember exactly what it looked like, I didn’t look that close, but it was a hunk. Anyway, we would give him dimes and quarters, shit we were going to buy Twinkies with but instead pay this guy to pee out the side of his overalls.
THERE WAS THIS ONE FAMILY MY MOM KNEW BACK THERE IN ALPINE. The old man worked in the logging woods while his wife, like a lot of women at the time, would birth kids and work to the bone keeping the house, working in the field, working in the garden, that kind of stuff. She was twenty-nine or thirty but looked real old.
A lot of guys were jealous and would keep their wives away from everything, but this particular guy was so jealous, when he would go to work in the logging woods, he would board his wife up. His kids would go to school, and he would nail two-by-fours over the doors so she couldn’t get out while he was gone.
Years later, when they started getting more modern things, his wife got a douche bag—I guess she’d been to a doctor and he said, “You should use this douche”—but the old man cut it to pieces with scissors and threw it out in the yard. He didn’t want her putting anything in her. “You’re not using shit like that,” he said—because I guess a douche bag has got a little nozzle on it, stick it in your whatever. But anyhow, he would board her up while he was at work.
The kids would go to Carmie’s store after school, and they would ask if Carmie—who was a real nice old guy—had seen their daddy so they could get in the house, but the daddy would be hiding behind the freezer with ice cream. Carmie told us about this. Their daddy would buy ice cream, and he would hide behind the meat freezer while he wouldn’t let his kids eat anything but mustard and biscuits. That’s what he sent them to school with, and that’s where I got the thing with Karl in Sling Blade where he eats mustard and biscuits.
When kids used to go to school back in Alpine—this was in my mom’s time, not mine—they would take their lunch to school in a lard bucket. Only we called it the dinner bucket, because in the South we didn’t have lunch. We had breakfast, we had dinner at noon, and we had supper. So we never heard of lunch. Anyway, kids would take a dinner bucket of biscuits because we ate whatever was cheapest. And if you’re at school all day, butter and mayonnaise would spoil, so my grandmother used to put mustard on the biscuits because mustard wouldn’t spoil quick. But a lot of kids would only have biscuits. There was a lot of beauty in Alpine, but there was also a lot of poverty.
So the jealous guy’s kids would just get to eat beans, corn bread, stuff like that. They never got anything from the store that would be considered a luxury, like bologna or anything from the meat counter.
But the dad would go buy an ice cream at the store and hide behind the freezer if his kids came into the store looking for him. He would tell Carmie to tell his kids he hadn’t seen their daddy because he didn’t want the kids to see him back there eating an ice cream.
People like that. That makes you want to write shit. Tom and I wrote a screenplay called The Sounds of Country, which I’ll probably never make because I don’t want to make it for Hollywood. I’d rather just be satisfied knowing I wrote the story of my uncle Don. Anyway, when I tell people some of these things, they look at me like I’m from another planet, but I lived in this.
Part I
I was born in 1951 in the little southwest Arkansas town of Nashville. My family moved to the somewhat larger town of Malvern a year later, and that’s where I grew up. My father was a lawyer and judge. My mother, like virtually all mothers in those days, was a housewife. I had three sisters.
I was a bashful little boy who hated school and didn’t make very good grades. I loved to read comic books (we called them funny books) and to fish on Lake Catherine and to go to the Ritz Theatre and see neat movies like Attack of the Crab Monsters and The Creeping Unknown.
When I was twelve, the Epperson family got some new neighbors. The Thorntons. Billy Bob was eight. He wore glasses and had buckteeth and looked remarkably like the Ernie Douglas character in My Three Sons (and he actually was one of three sons). We had some things in common—we both liked sports and monster movies and funny books—but a four-year age difference is a vast chasm when you’re a kid, and I certainly didn’t regard him as an equal. When my friends and I needed a body to round out the sides when we were playing basketball or touch football in the backyard, Billy Bob was brought in.
We had a nickname for Billy Bob. “Silly Slob.” We played mean tricks on him. Once when Chuck Shryock and I attempted to retrieve an errantly tossed football from some bushes, we encountered a yellow-jacket nest and were driven away. We were standing around trying to figure out how to get the ball out of there, when who should come walking down the sidewalk but little Billy Bob. We told him we couldn’t get our football out of the bushes because we were “too big” to get in there. Billy, always eager to be included by the big kids, was happy to help us out. He crawled back into the bushes, and then an instant later tore out of there with the football under his arm, screaming as yellow jackets swarmed around him and stung him repeatedly. Chuck and I laughed our heads off.